posted 12-09-1999 11:53 PM            

Jim

1. The Tarantella is an Italian "spider dance" from the 16th century. It was a dance that inspired many composers like Rossini, and Shostakovich in his Ninth.

2. About imitations of spoken languages in Moussorgsky's songs F. Maes [3] writes; above all Moussorgsky wanted to point out in coherence with characteristics like age, social class and character of persons, the variety in spoken language [3]. For that reason I think he definitely read Wagner's essay Judaism in Music (1850 and 1869) [9].
Dmitri, a Moussorgsky adept, took over this kind of technique and assimilated this in his instrumental works. He let, so to say, the instruments speak.

3. It's an interval frequently used in a harmonic-and melodic way by Mahler and Bruckner. But it is also a phenomenon in pop music like Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones or So Lonely by the Police.
In traditional world music the Fourth interval often lends a magical sound through repetition!

4. The many repetitions of the same interval like quart, quint or octave in parallels, the repetition of motifs or melodies, penetrating rhythms, drones, bourdons, pentatonic scales and the use of certain instruments like the Turkish drum, Tambourine, woodwinds in particular the Cor Anglais are specifically used by Western composers to create an Eastern (India, Japan, China, Indonesia) atmosphere.

5. In Ravel's orchestration, he uses a trumpet against the strings and woodwind to reflect the conversation between the "two Jews" [12]. Ravel had a great interest in traditional Jewish music. Ravel dedicated the Minuet from "Le tombeau de Couperin" to Dreyfus. His mother was a Jew and he studied Hebrew. It seems highly unlikely S. didn't know this [16].

6. There's a strong likeness, even when it's very short, with the Duetto from Stravinsky's Pulchinella.

7. Of all his Russian predecessors Moussorgsky was the composer with whom Shostakovich had the greatest affinity. He assimilated his heritage in new orchestrations of works by Moussorgsky, but in a less direct way of his own oeuvre, according to F. Maes. Modest Moussorgsky was also interested in the traditional Jewish melodies.

8. The Catacombs refer to death. A year before M. wrote Pictures at an Exhibition his friend , the painter Hartman or Gartman, died (1874). Hartman painted himself with Lantern in his hand while he searched the Parisian Catacombs. M. attributed a sign of honour to Hartman. In the score Moussorgsky wrote the next words;" Sepulcrum Romanum". After that he would have said:" A Latin text with death in a dead language"[6].
According the New Grove about the Roman Catacombs: " The Jewish chant must have been transmitted to the Christian church mainly by cantors, to whom there are some epitaphs in the Roman Catacombs" [8]. Could it have been, Shostakovich was informed about this matter?

9. Yakubov's remarks on the string quartets ("the confessional diaries of a great soul") follow the same conventional pattern. There's, for example, no recognition of the Jewish character of the Recitative and Romance in the Second Quartet.
Sound-Allegories; a summary of Manashir Yakubov's program notes the 1998 Shostakovich seasons at the Barbican, London.
Note: It makes me wonder in the first place WHY they started to think it was a Jewish melody!
For it's my conviction (knowing the Sephardic and other Jewish songs) that both melodies from the Ninth and The Second string quartet are Litanies in the way of Jewish songs.

10. Shostakovich detested every form of injustice and racism[3]. His interests for Jewish subjects did grow after the arrangement of the Opera from his Jewish friend V. Fleischmann. Shostakovich was familiar with Jewish Modi and Kletzmer music[3] (16).

11. The last movement contains passages from the first movement.

12. Shostakovich instrumented Wiener Blut [4] by J. Strauss and made an arrangement from a polka for a friend [5]. Also the rhythm looks like the Radetzky march.

13 DSCH= is the autograph of the composer. The eighth string quartet has those tones as a theme. You can find it in many works, like the Tenth Symphony, Fifth String Quartet , etc.

14 In his letters to Kabalevsky one could read Moussorgsky's discriminatory attitude against Jews. According to F. Maes and R.Tarushkin [3+12] it concerns one Jew instead of two. The first named Samuel Goldberg (1874) for the European form and the second Schmuyle for the Yiddish form. This musical painting has a negative connotation; namely to make them ridiculous! In the conversation M. used the contrast of very high and very low notes to imitate their pronunciation in a ridiculous way.
Wagner wrote about the Jewish pronunciation; "The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases- and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerable jumbled blabber etc" [9].
Note: it seems to me while Shostakovich knew Moussorgsky's letters, he must have also known his anti-Semitic attitude.